Society and Happiness

Sir: I have already had the pleasure of receiving privately two ill-mannered letters from your correspondent F.W.N. Wright on the same subject which he has broached in your columns. I have no wish to prevent any person from airing their prejudices in print, even at my own inconvenience. But I fear that your correspondent is trying to bamboozle me and himself with heavy Latin. So I will try to translate my statement and your correspondent’s into plain English.

This ‘Increment of Association’ I take to be the simple fact that we gain by being together. This is not strictly true, for we get both good and evil from our fellows, and who but God can reckon the account? To be happy we need our fellows or the thought of them; but the more we are under the influence of Society, that mechanical mother we have invented for ourselves, the less we see or know of our fellows, and that little is often the deadpan, doughnut-eyed, clawed and shambling husk of them.

Yet Society keeps alive the memory of what our fathers did and a few of their skills. We remember what we did by proxy; we imagine what our children may do in spite of us; and so man appears to us a creature extended in time, armadillo-scaled, the individual sin sloughed off the collective back. This fantasy is necessary to keep us interested in large social issues such as killing people we have never met and bulldozing mountains into the sea; but it does not really make us happy. Your correspondent says, too, that I meant, but did not say, that we should all have more money. I did not mean any such thing.

page 230

A persistent preoccupation with money seems to me quite deadening to every other feeling. I would recommend your correspondent to forget the ‘present monetary system’ and take up the study of compost.

1955 (107)